Reviewed by Clive O'connell

IT IS over, which will be a relief for some. Olli Mustonen's review of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, an exercise strung out over three years, concludes tonight with the two outer elements: No. 1 in C and the formidable No. 5, the Emperor, in E flat. Both are substantial works and give plenty of scope to experience the pianist's idiosyncratic interpretations.

For those of us who have been along for the whole journey, the ride has been packed with incident, and it was oddly reassuring to see on Thursday night that Mustonen remained true to his faith. The orchestral tutti that opens the hearty Concerto No. 1 was no sooner over than the soloist initiated his push-me-pull-you attack, phrases abruptly dwindling to inaudibility and mellifluous scale passages turning into spiky toccatas, dynamic contrasts veering into jarring eccentricity.

Conducting from the keyboard, Mustonen kept the MSO taut and mobile with some finely manipulated woodwind passages in the major work's spellbinding slow movement. As a bonus, the program enjoyed an Australian premiere, Mustonen's own Jehkin Iivana, which sustains a post-Sibelius starkness rooted in folk lyricism with much colour and activity.

As for the Beethoven cycle, despite gripping passages, the overriding impression has been of surface-skimming. Mustonen dressed up, often radically altered, the concertos' trimmings but without shedding any intellectual or emotional new light on well explored musical highways.